brainpopfandomcom-20200223-history
Engineering Design Process/Transcript
Transcript An animation shows a television. Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Cassie and Moby. An infomercial plays on the screen. FLIP: Ugh, chewing food: everybody hates it! A man in the commercial is shown eating a plate of food in the messiest way possible. The food gets all over his shirt and falls onto the table. FLIP: It's messy, complicated, and unsanitary! Is this the future we were promised?! The man in the commercial has had enough. He throws his arms up in the air. FLIP: Hi, I'm Flip Fauntleroy, the inventor of Choo-It! The man speaking, Flip, appears on the screen. He holds the Choo-It gadget in his hands. It looks like a set of interlocking gears stacked on top of each other. FLIP: It's got six utility patents, and it straps directly onto your existing face! An animation shows the previous man who was eating. He now has the Choo-It strapped to his face. He gives two thumbs-up, and Flip slings dumplings into his mouth through the Choo-It. MOBY: Beep! An animation shows a girl, Cassie, and her robot friend, Moby. They are in a garage watching the television. Moby has his hands on his hips. CASSIE: Ugh! Him? Really?! He probably didn't even invent that contraption! Cassie pulls out a typed letter and reads from it. CASSIE: Dear Cassie and Moby, How do people come up with great inventions? From, Mrs. Lambert-Migas' Science Class (Waynesboro, VA) CASSIE: I like the way you’re thinking! MOBY: Beep! Moby pulls a string to turn on a light bulb above his head. CASSIE: Great inventions rarely come from one big burst of inspiration. More often, inventors solve problems by following a series of steps. It’s called the engineering design process, or EDP, and anyone can learn it. People break it down in different ways, but I think of it as six main steps: identify, imagine, plan, create, test, improve. An animation shows a circular diagram with each step of the EDP process labeled. The labels read: identify, imagine, plan, create, test, improve. CASSIE: You can use it to create brilliant inventions that'll change the world. An animation shows the Wright Brothers testing an early aircraft. CASSIE: Or for little things, like how to keep your cat off the kitchen counter. An animation shows a counter with a small mirror attached to it. A cat jumps up on the counter, sees its reflection, then pounces off. CASSIE: The solution isn't necessarily a physical product. Processes, like improving the recipe for a medicine, are designed too. An animation shows a scientist working in the laboratory. Behind her, a complicated formula for ibuprofen is written on the board. CASSIE: No matter what form they take, useful solutions almost never come about on the first try. They emerge through iteration—repeating the engineering design process, over and over. An animation shows the Wright Brothers going through different stages of their invention. They’re shown writing out formulas on a chalkboard, then building a propeller, then testing an aircraft. CASSIE: Take the light bulb, an invention that changed the world… eventually. Cassie points to the lightbulb hanging in the garage. CASSIE: Thomas Edison often gets credit for it. But he didn’t exactly invent the light bulb—he improved it. MOBY: Beep? CASSIE: The invention of the light bulb started with identifying a problem that needed solving. In the late 1800s, it was finding a cheaper and safer alternative to candles. An animation shows a woman reading a book by candlelight. A cat jumps on the table and knocks the candle over. The EDP diagram is present, and the stage “identify” is enlarged. CASSIE: Electric lamps existed, but they were extremely bright and flickered like crazy. Inventors imagined how they could use electricity to light people’s homes. An animation shows a man reading by electric light. It’s very bright and flickering. The EDP diagram changes phases to “imagine.” CASSIE: And worked on plans for a more practical electric light. Running electricity through a filament would make it glow without flickering. An animation shows a blueprint plan for a light bulb. The EDP diagram changes phases to “create.” CASSIE: While they were able to create working light bulbs, there was a major flaw. Testing revealed that the filaments burned out in minutes. An animation shows a man reading by the new lightbulb, but it quickly burns out. The EDP diagram changes phases to “test.” CASSIE: Still, there was clearly potential in this design—which is where Mr. Edison came in. He and his team set out to improve the filament by using different materials. Over and over again, they repeated many of the EDP’s steps: imagine, plan, create, and test. They tried more than 6,000 materials, and found that bamboo worked best. The bamboo filaments lasted for over a thousand hours! It took endless iteration, but at last, they’d designed a practical light bulb. An animation shows Edison screw a light bulb into a base repeatedly to test if it works. It fails again and again until finally the last test succeeds. MOBY: Beep. CASSIE: Yeah, the EDP can be a lot of work, but it leads to great solutions. Like when I got to be part of the team that built the SS Cuttlefish. Our prize-winning entry in the Seventh Annual All-Neighborhood Raft Race. We knew there'd be strong competition, so we needed a great design. Cassie points to the raft hanging on the wall behind her. CASSIE: For more than a week, we met here in the garage every day to work on it. During the "identify" step, we made a concept map with our problem in the middle. And broke the problem down into smaller parts. An animation shows Cassie in the garage with her friends Tim, Nat, and Rita. They are standing around a white board covered in notes and diagrams. CASSIE: Like, a successful raft can’t have leaks, so we needed waterproof materials. The animation shows the section of the whiteboard that details the materials needed for the raft. CASSIE: We also wanted a design that'd move through the water quickly. Those were some of our criteria: specific goals that our design needed to achieve. An animation shows a section of the whiteboard labeled “Platform Design.” CASSIE: The rules of the race gave us one more criterion: The raft had to be made of household materials. Cassie tacks a post-it underneath the “Materials” section of the whiteboard. The note on it says “household materials.” CASSIE: We also had to consider the constraints, or limitations on the design. You couldn't spend more than $50 on materials… And you had just ten days to design and build the thing. An animation shows a section of the whiteboard labeled “Constraints.” Two post-its are tacked up in the section. One says “Budget- $50” and the other says “Time- 10 days.” CASSIE: All this preparation helped inform our next step: We researched materials that fit our criteria and constraints. Research is so important that some people think of it as its own step in the EDP. Looking at existing designs for rafts also helped us pick an approach. A split-screen shows Nat on one side, studying a raincoat. Tim and Cassie are shown on the other side, reading and using a tablet at the library. MOBY: Beep? CASSIE: Nope, our first design still failed. We forgot to consider the total weight the raft needed to carry. An animation shows Rita, Cassie, and Nat at a pond, sitting in their first raft. Tim is still standing on the deck, waiting to join. The raft is sewn together with raincoats and ponchos. Blown-up garbage bags are attached all around it. As soon as Tim steps into the raft, it starts sinking. CASSIE: In our next iteration, we refined the problem to include this criterion. An animation shows a hand adding a post-it to the whiteboard. It says “weight capacity: 450 pounds.” CASSIE: We were running out of time and we'd used up our budget on the first design. So… that's how we ended up with this model. An animation shows a basic wooden frame with 4 seats. Dozens of rubber ducks are attached along the frame. MOBY: Beep? CASSIE: You know, I didn’t ask why Tim had so many rubber ducks… An animation shows Tim in a bathtub filled with rubber ducks. CASSIE: But I have a huge kitty ranger collection, so who am I to judge? Cassie holds up a small plush kitten dressed as a ranger and gives it a hug. CASSIE: Anyway, we did more research to figure out how to solve our flotation issue. An animation shows Cassie and Nat wearing lab coats and standing around a pool. A cement block is tied to a single rubber duck. Nat kicks it into the water. The duck sinks, and Cassie takes notes on her clipboard. CASSIE: We ran some tests on our materials and read up on buoyancy. That’s the scientific principle that explains how much floating power an object has. An animation shows a whiteboard that has the formula for buoyancy. The word “gravity” is at the top, and an arrow points downward to a circle labeled object. The word “buoyancy” is at the bottom, and points upwards at the same object. There are additional labels too, such as “mass of object,” ”density of object,” and “density of the fluid.” CASSIE: It helped us figure out how many ducks we needed to stay above water. Nat pushes another cement block into the water, this time with multiple rubber ducks tied to it. The ducks stay afloat. CASSIE: Then, we imagined how we could lay them out, and sketched out our plan. To make sure everything fit together properly, we made a scale drawing first. An animation shows Cassie, Tim, Nat, and Rita standing around a scaled drawing of the raft, discussing the design. CASSIE: It took time to create, but it saved us from making any mistakes when we built our new prototype: A working model of the design that lets you test it out. An animation shows Cassie, Tim, Nat, and Rita standing at the dock of the pond, holding their new frame for the raft. MOBY: Beep? CASSIE: Well, it worked at first, but then we started losing ducks left and right! Our frame held up this time, so we kept that part of the design. Cassie, Tim, Nat, and Rita are successfully floating in their raft. Many rubber ducks start detaching and breaking free from the raft. CASSIE: But our flotation system was way too complicated. We needed something bigger than duckies… and more durable than garbage bags. An image shows the rubber ducks and the garbage bags on a drawing board. Both ideas are crossed out. CASSIE: Rita came up with using some big buckets with tight lids—brilliant! Cassie and Rita fist bump. CASSIE: We went through the rest of the EDP, and this design finally passed our test. Cassie, Tim, Nat, and Rita are sitting on the new raft, complete with six big buckets attached to the frame. The stages of the EDP process cycle through in a diagram at the top of the screen: identify, imagine, plan, create, test, improve. CASSIE: Our design wasn’t as flashy as some of the other rafts that entered the race. But that’s not what counted in this competition. An animation shows several rafts at the starting line of the race. Cassie’s team is in their raft. There are a few other teams shown at the starting line. One team is made up of robots, another team is made up of kids wearing sunglasses. CASSIE: Most other rafts started sinking before they made it to the finish line. An animation shows a sunken raft and several robots bobbing in the water. MOBY: Beep?! CASSIE: Nope, we took second place. Cassie holds up a second place ribbon. CASSIE: We never managed to catch up to this one other team. But they just used a rubber raft from the store! An animation shows a boy, Conrad, with a first place ribbon. He is wearing a bedbug costume and grinning as he holds up an inflatable raft. Conrad enters the garage, still dressed like a bedbug. CONRAD: Correction: I found the raft in my house, ergo, it is a household item. Conrad reads from a booklet of the Raft Race Rules. CONRAD: And, prior to my victory, competition rules did not specify whether-- Moby grabs the booklet, and puts it through the Choo-It that he strapped to his face. The Choo-It shreds the entire book. CASSIE: Why are you dressed like a bug? The closing animation shows Flip Fauntleroy going through the EDP stages while inventing the Choo-It. First, he is sitting at the table with food all over his face. He imagines the Choo-It. The animation shows him creating a scale drawing, creating the product, wearing it in a messy living room, and drawing new iterations of it. Category:BrainPOP Transcripts Category:BrainPOP Engineering & Technology Transcripts